Sunday Whatever: Eleonora and Poe by Dale Williams Barrigar

“ERNEST. From the soul?

GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest          criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

“Under the preservation of a specific form, my soul is safe.”
Raymond Llull

Edgar Allan Poe was the kind of individual who could fall in love with a woman after seeing her for a mere few moments, or less, on the street. Dante had this feeling when he first saw Beatrice, and her later early demise compelled him to take twelve years out to compose the greatest single literary work of the Western World, a poem that still helps to define what the afterlife is (in our imaginations) eight centuries after he finished it. (And he died almost immediately after finishing it.) 

Poe also described his notions of the afterlife in his grand, strange, bizarre, overarching, prophetic, odd, way-out-there, way-ahead-of-its-time, “nonfictional” prose poem “Eureka” (a work which accurately prefigured and predicted many scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, which is a topic for another essay), a sui generis (one of a kind) work which he labeled as his greatest.

His imaginings of the afterlife also were directly connected to his visions of beautiful women here in this life, as with Dante, including women he saw only once somewhere on the streets of Richmond, Baltimore, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, fell deeply and profoundly in love with, saw for less than a few seconds (in this life), never spoke to or engaged with on any level, and never saw again – and never forgot.

Poe once famously wrote that “the most poetic of all themes is the death of a beautiful woman.” This statement has rightly outraged innumerable feminists (both female and male) in the last century and a half who have utterly misunderstood it.

Those who have charged Poe with misogyny for this striking, indelible statement have forgotten, or are unaware that, Poe saw his actress mother die a horrible, painful death when he was a toddler, later had his beloved stepmother also die on him when he was barely out of his teens, and also watched his beloved young wife die of the exact same disease (tuberculosis) as he nursed her and stayed by her side until the very end, and whose death he only survived by a mere couple of years himself, after failing to find another partner to take her place in his mad desperation at her vanishing from this mortal sphere, leaving him alone, all too alone, again, in exactly the same way his mother had done, against her will, when his consciousness was just beginning to dawn.

Poe craved solitude, and lived in it, and he made as much or more use of it as any American before or since has done; but even the most solitary among us sometimes needs the human touch; even the Desert Fathers of the early Christian churches accepted visitors in their hide-away mountain caves from time to time; even John the Baptist came out of the wilderness.

Poe wrote that the death of beautiful women was beautiful (and poetic) because he thought women were beautiful, and he refused NOT to believe that the early ends on this earth of the human beings he knew best and loved most had no meaning and were simply a random, horrible, awful, unbearable part of a pointless existence. (Whether or not the afterlife actually exists, it definitely exists in our minds and imaginations, and therefore, hearts; “how high that highest candle lights the dark,” wrote Wallace Stevens). 

Poe believed that the end of life has a strange beauty to it, just as the beginning of life does; and he was more affected by the deaths of his two mothers, and his wife, than he was by anything else that ever happened to him in this mortal, death-smeared dream of a world. (“Anything I dreamed I dreamed alone.” – Poe.)

All of Poe’s many, multiple, myriad, manifest failures in this life, romantically, socially, financially, literarily and artistically, matching up to make him a “beautiful loser” not unlike Van Gogh, Thoreau, or Melville, were really as nothing to him when the haunting memories of his biological mother’s end suddenly came back on him in daydream, dream or nightmare. And after his beloved, adopted mother died suddenly as well (somehow he had believed that she, at least, would live forever), Poe went on a drunken tear in which he nearly gambled his life away, just as he would do after the death of his young wife later, and just as John Lennon later did after the early death of his own mother.

(Poe, John Lennon, and Kafka, three very different artists who are somehow all mysteriously connected to each other (in my mind), all died at forty.)

In stories like “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleonora,” and in poems like “To Helen,” “The Raven,” “Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,” and “THE SLEEPER” (my capitals), the female characters are always beautiful and wildly attractive, intelligent, and idiosyncratic (one of a kind, perhaps like Poe’s actress mother). But it’s also a strange (mystically knowing, even when terrified) beauty, and an ambiguous attractiveness which classes these women as at least otherworldly figures of another dimension, at worst, witches (the bad kind), and at best, angels, holy creatures, mythic beings, muses – goddesses. (The male narrators are not so much impotent as vastly preferring sex in the head, where nothing ever goes wrong; again, a topic for another essay.)

When someone we love deeply dies (or passes on), on one level they become much more present to us than they were in life; grief is an intense engagement with the departed beloved, a new connection (not necessarily comforting at first, but often comforting later) and internalization, as well as a final separation, and Poe knew grief as well as, or better than, any of us.

Grief is the engine which almost always drives Poe’s very best works in poetry, short fiction, and the essay; grief as muse, and muse as a stopgap way to escape grief. Like many nineteenth century Americans, Poe loved cemeteries and was known to frequently haunt the graveyards and tombstones of the departed women he still loved, sometimes in his socks, drunk, in the snow. (“I was hurt into greatness,” William Faulkner, a massive Poe fan, once drunkenly mumbled to someone who wrote it down.)

In the short story “Ligeia,” one of his very best, Poe’s narrator talks about the title character’s eyes for a very long time, describing their unusual beauty, size, and intensity. Then the narrator blurts out, “The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it – that something more profound than the well of Democritus – which lay far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed with a passion to discover. Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.”

Whilst other young men of his time are out pursuing wealth, fame, glory, or Manifest Destiny, Poe’s narrator remains home alone with his laudanum bottle at hand and endlessly obsesses all night long about the person who’s sitting in the other room not too far away. This unusual, not to say eccentric, behavior appears at least half mad on its surface, until the astute (careful) reader realizes that this young man truly is trying to fathom, and understand the true beingness of his wife and beloved in a way that few men perhaps ever do (and certainly not the football-watching, Nacho-cheese-eating, beer-swilling American variety). And Ligeia, for her part (who doesn’t like sports), is in the other room returning the favor.

“I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense,” says Poe’s speaker, “such as I have never known in woman.” Poe receives a justified swipe upside the head by the embattled feminists for the second part of this statement, until one remembers that he lived in an age when the vast majority of women were never allowed to go to school, or even read the books or papers they wanted to.

(Emily Dickinson’s father was known as a radical around town because he put no restrictions on the reading material of his special daughter which he did, not because he was much of a feminist, but because he was a humanist despite himself, and a sensitive father who could see he would never be able to really stop her anyway.)

Most profoundly (and hilariously), Poe gives Ligeia (makes her the creator of) his own poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” which the author transplants from another place in his own works, thereby plagiarizing from himself and making Ligeia a creator and poet who can compete with none other than Edgar Allan Poe, a curious and self-referential transgender doubling that’s so very radical it would still be considered highly controversial in our own time and place (USA, 2024 CE) to anyone who looks closely at it. (Also see “Morella” and “Berenice.”)

The ill and sickly Ligeia makes what seems to the narrator an unusual request right before she passes from this mortal sphere: she asks her husband and study partner to read her own poem about the worms back to her aloud. He does so; she expires; the narrator writes: “She died: and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine.”

(Poe knew where to best set outlandish tales of departed ghostly lovers who return to haunt their beloveds in various creepy, dream-like ways, in undisclosed locations generally in the cold northern climes which are the Land of Poets and Philosophers and ghost and horror stories extraordinaire, old Germany.)

My favorite work by Poe is the brief, intense, cinematic, highly re-readable, fairy-tale-like, folkloric, and all-encompassing short story, “Eleonora,” because this is where poor Edgar truly comes to terms with all of it, the death, the death, the death. Its opening is very much worth quoting at length because in one way all one needs to know about Poe is in this quotation.

Read this quotation until it becomes absorbed into your own bloodstream and a natural part of your own mind, and you will own (in a good way) the most important aspects of Edgar Allan Poe.

“I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant [knowing] of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the ‘light ineffable’…We will say, then, that I am mad.”

After its title, “Eleonora” begins with a quote from eleventh century Spanish philosopher Raymond Llull, translated from the Latin as, “Under the preservation of a specific form, my soul is safe,” a quote Poe probably cribbed from French poetry and novel titan Victor Hugo.

“Eleonora” as a name means the same things that Helen, Lenore of “The Raven” (and the poem “Lenore”), and Annabel Lee do. These names represent a dazzling light (everlasting) which equates to a definition of beauty.

The short story “Eleonora” occurs in The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass by the River of Silence, and is the tale (transformed) of Poe’s relationship with his wife. It begins with the myth, or the psychological reality, of innocence, as seen in the Garden of Eden, childhood, and young love. The Valley’s natural beauty is repeatedly likened to the natural beauty of Eleonora, who for most of the story is fifteen years of age, while the narrator is five years older at twenty.

(Many got married that young in Poe’s era; not an outrageous age then, it was also somewhat on the young side. Jerry Lee Lewis, from the South like Poe, in a later age also married a super-youthful teenaged (not first-) cousin, just as Elvis, another Southerner, fell in love with a teenager he never, ever got over. Elvis was 42 when he died, in a manner VERY, very similar to that of Edgar Allan Poe.)

At one point, The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass undergoes a mystical, magical, cinematic, sweeping, Walt Disney-like, dreamlike, surreal transformation as tall flamingos and silver fishes appear, the plants change colors, and the “songs of the bard of Shiraz” (maybe Hafez) begin to ring from the hard speckled stones and the springy green mosses. But then things change again – in an instant, or quicker than an instant.

“She had seen that the finger of death was upon her bosom,” says the narrator, and there’s one thing than torments Eleonora more than her soon-to-be (and she knows it) dying: it is the dreaded thought of her lover, husband, soul mate and cousin being with another woman after she herself has wafted out of this mortal sphere for good against her will.

“And I called the Mighty Ruler of the Universe to witness the pious solemnity of my vow.” The narrator, he says, will never betray Eleonora, not even in death. She peacefully subsides, reassured in this (dubious) knowledge. (Later the narrator calls God “Him.”)

The narrator goes on living alone for many years in The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. Eleonora haunts him there, “sighing upon me in the evening winds, or filling the air which I breathed with perfume from the censers of the angels…and once – oh, but only once! I was awakened from a slumber, like the slumber of death, by the pressing of spiritual lips upon my own.”

But everything ends, “and I left it [The Valley] forever for the vanities and the turbulent triumphs in the world.”

The narrator meets Ermengarde in the world, “the ethereal Ermengarde, the seraph Ermengarde, the angel Ermengarde.” He falls so deeply, powerfully, suddenly in love with her on first sight (like Poe sometimes did with various women he saw on the street, and like Dante did with Beatrice) that he falls at her feet and marries her almost immediately (she has been waiting for him).

Eleonora returns. In the typical Poe tale, it would be to wreck her vengeance, or at least to freak the unfaithful narrator out to the point of a nervous breakdown or another black-out-drunk drinking spree.

But she only speaks one sentence. “Sleep in peace! for the Spirit of Love reigneth and ruleth, and, in taking to thy passionate heart her who is Ermengarde, though art absolved, for reasons which shall be made known to thee only in Heaven, of thy vows unto Eleonora.”

Poe wrote this story of forgiveness, freedom and beauty in 1842, the year they found out Virginia, his wife, had tuberculosis; it was first published in a literary annual titled The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1842. She died of the disease five years later with Edgar Allan Poe at her side, although it’s said that he stepped out of the room at the very last moment, to let her go (just like he’d done with his mother).

(When the sleep-deprived, family nurse William Blake’s best friend and brother died in his arms, the poet-painter said he saw his sibling’s spirit rushing up through the ceiling “clapping its hands.”)

Poe lasted two pin-ball-style, volcanic, roller-coaster, drunken, depressed, grief-filled, hysterical, hilarious, debt-ridden, sober, haunted, dreamlike more years during which he continued to write almost nonstop, masterpiece after masterpiece, before they literally found him in the gutter outside the bar in a delirious stupor which led to his demise very soon after (a mere few days, during which he kept talking incoherently to people who weren’t in the hospital room, at least not that anyone else could see).

For reasons unknown to this day, he was wearing someone else’s clothes when they found him, perhaps as if to say he’d never really belonged here at all anyway, and had only been playing a role. His favorite word was soul.

Dale Williams Barrigar